Fortney: In Canada, gay activist was a hero. In Montenegro, they wanted him dead

In 2013, Zdravko Cimbaljevic had the honour as serving as international grand marshal at Vancouver’s Pride Parade. A week later, he had to hide in his apartment, knowing that hundreds, if not thousands, of people wanted him dead.

“My friends had to bring me food,” says the charming 34-year-old when we meet outside a Calgary hotel conference room where he is spending the better part of Tuesday morning. “I knew I couldn’t live like that, I had to leave.”

In the 21st century, it’s hard to imagine any member of the LGBTQ community fearful of venturing out into public. Cimbaljevic, though, didn’t live in Canada at the time of the parade.

After his joyful experience surrounded by more than 650,000 participants and supporters at Vancouver’s annual event, he quickly returned to Montenegro, the small eastern European country with a similar number of people.

A famed activist known in his country as its “first out gay man,” Cimbaljevic is one of the featured panellists at Welcoming the Rainbow, the National LBTQ+ Newcomer Settlement Conference, being held Tuesday and Wednesday in Calgary.

The conference, a first of its kind in Canada, has brought together CEOs or their designates from more than 100 organizations across the country. The participants hail from immigrant-serving agencies, resettlement agencies and organizations assisting the LGBTQ community.

“We have two days to come up with a concrete action plan,” says Anila Lee Yuen, the CEO of Calgary’s Centre for Newcomers. “We want to come up with ways to help the LGBTQ+ newcomers to Canada settle and integrate properly into Canadian society.”

Thanks to funding by the province and Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada, the host organization, Centre for Newcomers, has brought together the country’s top experts to take on such topics as developing a national training plan for frontline workers and how to address the health and wellness needs of LGBTQ newcomers to Canada.

The origins of the inaugural national conference, says Lee Yuen, can be traced to 2016, when she signed on as the Centre for Newcomers’ new CEO. “I looked around the office and I saw no flag,” she says of the familiar rainbow colours that represent support for and celebration of the LGBTQ community. “I asked if there was a reason for this and the staff said no. A few said they’d love to, but they just don’t get any LGBTQ newcomers.”

In 2011, Zdravko Cimbaljevic came out as the first gay man in Montenegro fighting for LGBTQ rights.

There was a likely reason for the fact that no one was pronouncing their LGBTQ status as new arrivals.

In many of the countries where they were arriving from, people of anything other than a heterosexual orientation often face public censure, find themselves on the wrong side of the law and, in some cases, are threatened with violence.

Such was the experience of Zdravko Cimbaljevic who, after word got out that he was organizing Montenegro’s first pride parade in the summer of 2013, opened a local newspaper to find his “obituary” — an obscenity-laden missive — inside.

“I was homeless for six months,” he says, as no one would rent him an apartment and the university that he attended wouldn’t allow him to inhabit a dorm room.

Before and after the pride parade, where he and about 100 other participants had to flee for their lives after protesters began attacking them, he received more than 250 death threats.

Still, he knew the dangers of being out in a society where being gay is considered unnatural and sinful by the majority of the population. It was after being attacked in 2010, in fact, he decided to become his country’s first open advocate for members of the LGBTQ community.

“If something happened to me, if I disappeared, at least people would ask, ‘What happened to that guy?’” says Cimbaljevic, who came back to Canada in late 2013 and obtained refugee status as a persecuted minority. “Otherwise, my family would just have reported me as a missing person.”

As a white male who speaks perfect English, Cimbaljevic feels he owes it to his fellow LGBTQ newcomers to Canada to advocate on their behalf.

“I felt lots of guilt over leaving everyone behind,” he says of his decision to make Canada, a much safer place for members of the LGBTQ community, his new home. “But I will still continue my activism, internationally and locally.”

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